The Bill Frist Rx

Meet former Sen. Bill Frist, a renegade “Obamacare”-loving Republican who is in the mood for some real bipartisanship.

Yes, the same Frist who as Senate majority leader led an army into the culture wars over Terri Schiavo and whose efforts in 2004 to unseat his then-rival, Minority Leader Tom Daschle, led to a nasty — and personal — Washington battle royal.

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Now, Frist is pushing for a national conversation on end-of-life care and dismissing “caricatured” talk of death panels. He’s committing Republican heresy in endorsing elements of the loathed Affordable Care Act. He’s standing shoulder to shoulder with Daschle in search of a bipartisan way to tackle one of the thorniest problems around: how to get control of health care costs before they sink the economy.

The Frist-Daschle reconciliation, in particular, is a source of amazement to some longtime Washington observers.

“I didn’t think they would ever talk again,” said Bill Hoagland, a budget expert and former aide to Frist who has joined the duo on a health cost control initiative at the Bipartisan Policy Center. “I was surprised, pleasantly, that they would work together.”

Daschle told POLITICO, “He’s been a very important partner and I would say has become a friend in spite of the fact that we’ve had a difficult history.”

“That is past and we now find much more in common than not,” he added. “We both know that we need to find a consensus way forward.”

Frist, a heart and lung transplant surgeon who is now focused on research and policy, is working on a sweeping list of bipartisan health issues. A conservative who left Congress in 2007, before the tea party arrived, he is flexing his independence as a private citizen.

“I am supportive of exchanges and ‘Obamacare’ generally,” Frist told POLITICO. He noted that the law’s core ideas of an individual mandate and state-based health insurance exchanges have conservative roots.

And he isn’t particularly shy about it either, to the irritation of erstwhile colleagues and conservative activists who have been battling to repeal “Obamacare” since it became law.

In a recent essay in The Week, Frist urged states to get on board with the insurance exchanges and said he supports the government-subsidized expansion of insurance.

“As a doctor, I strongly believe that people without health insurance die sooner,” Frist wrote. People can go to the emergency room, but they delay treatment of health concerns, skip preventive care and when they finally seek treatment, their condition is worse and more costly, he continued. “State exchanges are the solution. They represent the federalist ideal of states as ‘laboratories for democracy.’”